Booed by a bunch of kids

Aiiight look, everyone who knows me is aware that I love kids. I have 3 nieces who I love dearly and always enjoy playing with them. Take Your Child To Work Day is another story. I get somewhat annoyed this one day out of the year when parents bring their children, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc to work with them. I always end up employed at jobs that have special programs for kids and thus I’m always needed for something media or IT related. My last job, they let the kids tour the TV studio. The job before that one, they let the kids into the server room. This time around, they wanted to use of my training rooms to show kids movies on the 3 projector screens and to play games on the 10 PC’s. I call it my training room because I’m in charge of that room and the 18 other state of the art conference rooms in this building as well as other aspects of multimedia and production. Now of course I don’t get a heads up from HR til like a few days beforehand. So Monday they drop the bomb on me for Thursday’s event. So I do a quick run through on Tuesday with the folks running things and they appeared to be comfortable with the room. They tell me that they expect about 60 kids to come on the actual day and I’m sure you could’ve seen the joy on my face.

yes… I do occasionally watch ESPN in my training room during the work day🙂

Thursday rolls around and I head into work around 9:30am as usual. My tech get there at 7:30am, so he had the pleasure of getting them all set-up. I walk past the auditorium and see all the kids gathered there. There were an abundance of snacks outside the auditorium, but I passed on them. Yeah, I passed on donuts and other sweet pastries. Kinda heard even saying that I did that one. I’m tryna cut back and get in shape ya know. Anyway, 10am rolls around and about 20 kids head down to my training room. Now the folks who coordinated said that there would only be like 12 at a time. Ooooops, big mistake. Not enough computers for each kid. I came back to my office and eventually they figured it out somehow with the assistance of my tech and other employees who donated laptops. I had work to do and couldn’t spend my entire morning dealing with that nonsense.

At lunch time they brought the kids back into the auditorium and served them pizza ordered from some spot in DC. I should know the name of the spot for future reference cuz I was tearin’ it up!!! When I went into the auditorium, the ages of the kids seated at the time were like 5-8. One of the HR folks asked me of I could put something on the projection screens for the kids and I figured I’d be nice and provide them some entertainment. I threw on Nickelodeon and didn’t give it a second thought. I came back up to my office and had like 3 calls and a number of emails complaining about what was on. I called another one of my techs and told him to handle it since we was down there. He put it on Cartoon Network. I immediately got a call from a co-worker saying that she doesn’t allow her 3 kids to watch Cartoon Network. I was like WTH is up with this!!!?? I aint got time to play TV Guide for these youngins. So I told my tech to switch back to Nickelodeon which happened to be playing Dora the Explorer at that time.I walked back downstairs from my office, walked into the auditorium and all of a sudden I hear “There he is y’all…” coming from one of the parents (a co-worker of mine). I start to hear loud boos and chants from the kids of “No more Dora… No more Dora”. Now, don’t really think I was really hurt or anything, but all that nonsense was unnecessary. When I was in there, the ages of the kids were in the younger bracket, so I threw on Nickelodeon. I didn’t realize that there would be teenagers in there shortly thereafter. After I told my tech to throw it on the Cartoon Network, I didn’t expect a rack of parents to get all sideways about it. I pulled the 3 primary organizers aside and told them that next time they need to agree on a DVD to be played for the kids or relevant entertainment in the auditorium. They’re lucky I aint put it on ESPN fa real. Eventually we found Scooby Doo on some channel and everyone was (appeared to be) happy.

Scooby Doo calmed the angry crowd

Fast forward to 4 hours later in our reception room where they had the closing session for the kids. They gave them certificates and prizes, along with refreshments. I’m sitting in my office monitoring the event cuz I have cameras down there where I can see everything. These bad lil youngins were grabbing my mics off the podium messin’ around and what not. Those mics cost $700 a piece. Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannn!!! I jetted downstairs and took the mics from their hands and asked where there parents were. Ya know what these 2 lil waterhead bammas did… they kicked me and starting pulling on my shirt. I aint never seen these kids before today and I was straight stunned that they aint care about nothin’. I’m looking around at all these adults who think it’s funny. Not one of the chaperones bothered to help me flee from this barrage of bad kids. The minute their parents showed up, I realized why. Always the ghetto folks who work here and their bad kids. You know both of them were Black too. I should’ve said something to them, but those who know me know that I either remain silent or go off. I just let it slide. Come to the office to get some work done and end up babysitting.

Hopefully none of y’all had crazy experiences at your company’s Take Your Child To Work Day. If you have a bad experience to share, go ahead. Maybe it’ll make me feel better… lol